Category: games

I try to incorporate an activity into every lesson. My goal is to make math not suck and sitting and taking notes is not the way to do it. A colleague found this memory game in an investigation for parallel and perpendicular lines from Wapakonta High School (sorry, I don’t know who to credit.) I love this type of activity but I HATE cutting out paper and having to keep track of the paper from year to year. I played around with Google Slides until I came up with a workable electronic memory game.

I included the instructions in the memory game, delete two cards and if they are a match, keep them deleted. If they don’t match, control z twice and put them back. I made the graphs a background image so they wouldn’t be deleted by accident.

It was fun and it was great practice for identifying parallel and perpendicular from a slope. A few areas of improvement from the students, make the graphs bigger and make the cards images because they kept clicking on the ? and deleting it instead.

Who doesn’t love two truths and a lie? I picked up this idea from a fellow teacher. She doesn’t tweet but I want to give a shout out to Ms. Wood for this one. We started doing this during the comparing functions unit but you could do this with any unit. Imagine solving equations where two were solved correctly and one wasn’t. Great way to encourage students to defend their answers.

I do this in groups. The whole group has to agree what the lie is and be able to explain why. The lies are supposed to be based on common misconceptions, not some random wrong answer. The team presenting gets points if no one guesses correctly. Each guessing team writes on a whiteboard to commit to an answer. The team gets a point if the pick the correct lie. They get an additional point if they can accurately explain why it’s a lie.

Anytime you can make learning a game students love it. I love that we are sneaking critical thinking into the game.

Here are some examples of papers created. You decide what the lie is.

We have created these on individual whiteboards, scrap paper, and large chart paper. Whatever you have will work. I do recommend thicker markers if using paper. If not, the back of the room can’t see.

Please share topics you use two truths and a lie with. We would love to use them too.